The Heirloom Apple Hunters
New England once grew thousands of apple varieties. A band of devoted detectives, including College of the Atlantic professor Todd Little-Siebold, is racing against time to find the survivors.
Little-Siebold designed a field-based course on apple hunting using apples as an entry point for learning about changes in farming and loss of biodiversity. In the first class, Little-Siebold holds up an heirloom apple that’s in season and asks, “Why can’t I buy this apple in the supermarket?” His students spend three months trying to answer that question.
By Sara Anne Donnelly │Yankee Magazine
Todd Little-Siebold spends his days off investigating strange apple trees. One October morning, the tree that piqued his interest belonged to a young couple in Penobscot, an 18th-century village along a rocky shoreline of Maine’s Blue Hill Peninsula. The couple had connected with Little-Siebold after hearing about the Drap d’Or de Bretagne, a rare French apple thought lost to history that Little-Siebold and fellow apple hunters found four years ago in a neighboring town. This couple wondered whether their own tree might be another Drap d’Or, or some other missing and special Malus domestica.
Little-Siebold was all for it. “My problem is I have AADHD—Apple Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I’m like, ‘Apple! There’s an apple! Let’s go get the apple!’” he says. “It’s addictive. It’s like a treasure hunt every day.”
The Penobscot apple tree grew halfway down an embankment along a windy corner of Northern Bay. To get to it, Little-Siebold was led across the couple’s backyard, past a vegetable garden, a swing set, and a dozen or so loudly alarmed chickens and ducks. Along the way, the pair told him how, in the late 19th century, this had been the site of a busy brickyard and port, but by 1920 those industries had died out and a family farm had taken over. “We’ve been calling it the Bayview apple,” the husband said, pointing to the tree in question, growing so crookedly its mop of tangled branches skimmed the muddy beach, which was covered with tide-flattened sea grass and bruised yellow-and-pink apples. “We think they’re really good for sauce and pies, but they’re pretty good for eating, too.”
Little-Siebold scrambled beneath the lowest branch and climbed, grunting up the slippery embankment to the trunk, searching for the telltale graft scar that would prove someone long ago had intentionally grown this crooked tree. “I’m noticing broken plates, broken glass,” he called down. “This was the farmer’s dump. A lot of times they’d dump apples and the tree would come up in the dumps.” That would mean this tree is from seed, and not a cultivar at all. Little-Siebold trailed off. A short while later, he reemerged from the canopy, wiping his muddy hands on his cargo pants and tugging thoughtfully at his gray goatee. He plucked an apple from the tree and bit into it. “The first thing I would say is, wow, what a great apple,” he said. He studied the tree again, chewing thoughtfully. This tree could have sprouted from trashed cores, he mused, but then again, farmers often intentionally planted apple trees on the edge of their land, and erosion and storms could just have pushed this one sideways toward the shore over time. He scrutinized the firm white inside of the apple in his hand, the seeds forming a symmetrical oval. And then there was the fruit itself: complex, sweet, finely textured.
“I think you almost certainly have a cultivated fruit,” he announced. The homeowners grinned. “And it’s an amazing fruit.” He clipped three leaf buds each from the north and south sides of the tree and put them into test tubes to ship later to apple geneticists at Washington State University. After carefully packing those into his tote bag and filling a paper bag with sample fruit, he pointed to a row of large apple trees on the adjacent property. “Would it be OK for us to look at these, too?”
Welcome to the Maine apple hunt: an ad hoc effort to save heritage apples, the rare survivors of a vast and nearly vanished orchard landscape once filled with thousands of varieties.